Four stories first appearing in New England Review were cited as “Notables” in The Best American Short Stories 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout and Heidi Pitlor.

Those cited were Matthew Baker’s “Everything That Somehow Found Us Here” (33.2), and from 33.1 William Gilson’s “At the Dark End of the Street,” Jane Ratcliffe’s “You Can’t Be Too Careful,” and Christine Sneed’s “The Finest Medical Attention.”

The complete list of selections and notables can be found on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website, and the book can be purchased here and at your local booksellers.

Eleven years ago, a young man traveled through four states to meet with me. It was a few months after Patric had died, and until yesterday, I don’t think I had thought about this man in a few years. His name was in yesterday’s paper, not on the front page, but this is a newspaper at least two or three million people read each day, and here was this man’s name, section 2, page 4, the story an unfortunate one. It seems he had plagiarized a large portion of one of his former students’ dissertations and sent it off into the world as his own. The student had died two years earlier, in a diving accident somewhere in Italy, but his girlfriend recognized the prose that Dr. Krenek had claimed to have written.

Fiction by Christine Sneed

Christine Sneed

Michele’s daughter returned home in June, just after the solstice, from a year spent studying classical music in Madrid. Along with her guitar, she brought back a suitcase filled with dirty clothes, some of the shirts missing buttons, the jeans all with frayed cuffs. She also brought back a child five months from being born. Lindsay, Michele’s daughter, was twenty-three and unhappy in a way that made her wonder if unhappiness were her vocation, the way other people took up cooking or politics. The baby’s father was not someone she wanted to marry, though he had not asked her to marry him. He was a year younger than she was, had other girlfriends and smoked too much and spoke little English, though he did speak French and Italian along with his native Spanish. He was certain that he had a remarkable future ahead of him and children were not a part of it, at least not for a long time, something that Lindsay told her mother, who rolled her eyes and thought of her husband, Lindsay’s father, who had died ten years earlier and left her with debts she paid by selling their house with its rose trellises and vegetable garden and weeping willow. Lindsay’s father had invested the money he had inherited at twenty-seven from his parents in his friends’ businesses. He had been generous and foolish and infuriating, and Michele had adored him, even after she realized, a few years into their marriage, that she would be better off without him. Her daughter, however, did not adore her baby’s father. Her daughter had returned from Spain no longer a romantic, which bothered Michele more than the pregnancy.

“You don’t have to keep it,” she told Lindsay. “You could give it up for adoption. That’s probably the best thing to do.”

“I might,” was all Lindsay would say. “I don’t know yet.”

Other women her age had children all the time. If she had it, the baby would be given a name and learn to walk and eat solid food and sometimes he would cry in the middle of the night and Lindsay would not know how to console him. He would grow up and meet someone who became important to him very quickly and he would believe his life had changed and that everything would be different from that point on. She could see this was how many people lived: as if everything were already decided and they needed only to wait until they were delivered into the arms of the person who would love them to the exclusion of everyone else. This was, after all, what the songs she liked most were about, the movies and poems and novels, even the comic books. You lived as if someone could hardly wait to meet you. Possibly, this was the only way to live.

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NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Christine Sneed has published four stories in NER, one of which was selected for Best American Short Stories 2008. Her collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was published in November 2010 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Christine Sneed (31.4), whose work has appeared in NER a number of times over the years, is the subject of the Chicago Tribune’s “Remarkable Woman” feature:

Christine Sneed has spent much of her life writing—short stories, mostly, and poetry. And for nearly 20 years, her rewards were small. Some were published in prestigious literary journals, but many more didn’t make it.

One short story, “Quality of Life,” was rejected 19 times before it was accepted by the New England Review in 2007. Then stuff started happening.

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”